If you were a rich Roman you would normally live in a house and had marble walls but most Romans were not as rich and they lived in smelly rooms in apartment places with six stories called islands.
Each island took up a whole block, at one point in time there were 44,000 apartment houses within the walls of Rome.
The first floor of the apartment houses was not rented by the poor, the poor lived at the top. The more shaky the stairs were that means rent became cheaper.
The upper apartments were very hot, dirty, crowded, and dangerous.
Anyone who could not pay the rent was forced to move out and live on the crime infested streets.
A lot of people in Rome that lived in the top apartments through their waste out of the windows, there were 4,400 apartments so that really added up.
Because the government didn’t have money to do anything about people throwing their waste out of their windows homeless people got diseases from it.
A lot of things started to fall apart but a very important thing thing that started to fall apart was their roads.
Problem/Solution: In Cincinnati there have been aggressive fights against urban decay. Like many other major cities Cincinnati faces declining population and lack of development activity in some of it’s older neighborhoods. In Cincinnati billions of dollars are wasted to try to revise our city, there decaying urban centers and monuments. This was the same problem that Rome had. Rome could have used a technique to reduce the urban decay. The technique is Transcendental Meditation Program, it helps reduce crimes, violence, and accidents in the city because getting a small portion of the population to do this one thing can really add up. Like when a lot of Romans started becoming part of the christian faith eventually almost everyone started to become christian, then the religion was allowed in the empire. More possible ways to prevent urban decay would be to do things such as Habitat For Humanity, they do volunteer work to rebuild parts of cities. They have been working on places in Over the Rhine by the river front, Habitat For Humanity rebuilds houses for the poor so they can keep on living where they're living. They say that if one house starts to fall apart and the owner doesn't have the money to fix it then neighbors start to move out because of the decay of the surrounding houses, Habitat For Humanity plans to fix this problem by repairing the houses. Maybe Rome could start volunteer businesses like Habitat For Humanity and have people volunteer to help clean up the city. A guy named Kaid Benfield has a Clean up project in Over the Rhine downtown. His goal is to make the houses in Over the Rhine look nicer and keep the residents living in them. The main reason for inner-city neglect is land price inflation and land hoarding. The prices rise because when more people come in to live there the prices rise because houses are scarce, landowners see it as an investment because they will wait to sell there house so they will get more money for it. As Rome was getting more and more people they would have to maybe start doing this and after the citizens sell there house for a lot of money then they wouldn't exactly be homeless because they have money to go stay somewhere. Roy Douglas's permanent solution is to change the taxing system. He says that the root of the problem is land price inflation so he thinks if you change the tax system that the problem will be solved.
People to contact:
Transcendental Meditation Program 1-888-532-7686
Mailing address: Maharishi Foundation USA 1100 N. 4th Street, Suite 128 Fairfield, IA 52556
"Fall of the Roman Empire." Rome.info , Decline of Ancient Rome. N.p., 2006. Web. 14 Jan. 2013.
Coleman, Stacy. "The Roman Empire, Is America following in Their Footsteps?" The Roman Empire, Is America following in Their Footsteps? World Net Daily, 6 June 2011. Web. 15 Jan. 2013.
Link for project:
http://urbandecayproject.weebly.com
URBAN DECAY & FILTH IN THE CITY
RESEARCH:
Problem/Solution: In Cincinnati there have been aggressive fights against urban decay. Like many other major cities Cincinnati faces declining population and lack of development activity in some of it’s older neighborhoods. In Cincinnati billions of dollars are wasted to try to revise our city, there decaying urban centers and monuments. This was the same problem that Rome had. Rome could have used a technique to reduce the urban decay. The technique is Transcendental Meditation Program, it helps reduce crimes, violence, and accidents in the city because getting a small portion of the population to do this one thing can really add up. Like when a lot of Romans started becoming part of the christian faith eventually almost everyone started to become christian, then the religion was allowed in the empire. More possible ways to prevent urban decay would be to do things such as Habitat For Humanity, they do volunteer work to rebuild parts of cities. They have been working on places in Over the Rhine by the river front, Habitat For Humanity rebuilds houses for the poor so they can keep on living where they're living. They say that if one house starts to fall apart and the owner doesn't have the money to fix it then neighbors start to move out because of the decay of the surrounding houses, Habitat For Humanity plans to fix this problem by repairing the houses. Maybe Rome could start volunteer businesses like Habitat For Humanity and have people volunteer to help clean up the city.
A guy named Kaid Benfield has a Clean up project in Over the Rhine downtown. His goal is to make the houses in Over the Rhine look nicer and keep the residents living in them. The main reason for inner-city neglect is land price inflation and land hoarding. The prices rise because when more people come in to live there the prices rise because houses are scarce, landowners see it as an investment because they will wait to sell there house so they will get more money for it. As Rome was getting more and more people they would have to maybe start doing this and after the citizens sell there house for a lot of money then they wouldn't exactly be homeless because they have money to go stay somewhere. Roy Douglas's permanent solution is to change the taxing system. He says that the root of the problem is land price inflation so he thinks if you change the tax system that the problem will be solved.
People to contact:
Transcendental Meditation Program
1-888-532-7686
Mailing address:
Maharishi Foundation USA
1100 N. 4th Street, Suite 128
Fairfield, IA 52556
Habitat For Humanity
(740) 363-9950
Email:
habitatworld@habitat.org
location:
305 Curtis Street, Delaware, OH
Kaid Benfield:
Twitter:
@Kaid_at_NRDC
Roy Douglas:
tommasgraves@hotmail.com
Citations:
"Fall of the Roman Empire." Rome.info , Decline of Ancient Rome. N.p., 2006. Web. 14 Jan. 2013.
Coleman, Stacy. "The Roman Empire, Is America following in Their Footsteps?" The Roman Empire, Is America following in Their Footsteps? World Net Daily, 6 June 2011. Web. 15 Jan. 2013.
May, Lucy. "Urban Decay." Adobe, 20 Sept. 2010. Web. 14 Jan. 2013.